With a crumple of wrapping paper, a flattening of boxes and the clink and chink of empty bottles into the bin, comes the end of another Christmas.
The leftover turkey and ham have begun to lose their appeal, and this will likely last for around 12 months… Now, we now turn our focus to New Years Eve. A chance to shed the old, clear out our musty, mental clutter and be reborn into another 365-day era, vastly removed, revamped and improved from the last. That’s right folks, at this point, we’re always very ambitious and confident that the next 12 months will be better than the last… But is a new year really a fresh start?
As Australia burns, we can’t help but focus on the concept of death and rebirth. As bushfires rage up and down the East Coast, a red sun casts an eerie orange glow over Sydney as a monochrome dome of grey smoke covers the landscape. Yellow sun and crisp blue skies have given way to an endless haze and a red, sharply defined, perfect circle that struggles through the dense smoke.
The nightly news brings up desaturated scenes of twisted iron around blackened bricks on apocalyptic landscapes void of life. Once green pastures now barren, charred and desolate. The teary, soot-covered faces interviewed in front of smouldering wrecks that were once their home, adds a sad sense of reality to this natural disaster.
Despite the danger, many still choose to stay and defend their homes. Armed with garden-hoses and buckets they guard fence lines with expressionless bandana-covered faces… They won’t be thinking of the new year, or making resolutions… If they get through another day and still have their home, that in itself will likely become their personal triumph of the decade.
It really feels like the end times rather than the new year celebration. Even the yearly music festivals are cancelled, and holidaymakers have been forced to evacuate popular bush areas, with cars, motor homes and caravans, snaking slowly along major highways, untethered from their usual campsites, not sure where to go next… It really is a tragic, eerie time.
Even with all this… the Christmas period still has some sense of normality and as the dead space between Boxing Day and New Years begins to close, you can almost feel the collective sigh of relief at the end of 2019. Yet, this relief seems tainted with anxiety about what will define this next decade. Can we go another 10 years with bleach-blonde dickhead leaders, environmental disasters, climate change and a return of 80’s fashion? … God help us if 90’s fashion returns!
New Years Eve is a funny time. Quantum physics now tells us that time doesn’t exist. Or, the version of time that does exist isn’t linear… it’s strange and malleable. Yet, we place such significance on the end of our 365-day sprint. It’s a place where we draw the line in the sand, down tools and say… “that’s the end of that chapter”.
Is there something in a new year? Is a new year really a fresh start… a blank canvas to begin again? It is a strange time… you can almost feel this collective consciousness of winding down and reflecting. Celebrities start to die in threes, the pre-Christmas chaos switches to a strange quiet and lull… and then with an explosion of colourful fireworks and alcohol, it’s all over…. Back to work to countdown to 5pm, 5 days a week, wishing our short lives away as it all begins again… Bloody madness really.
Maybe there’s a reason our earth orbits the sun in 365-day arcs. Perhaps, coming back around to the point where we begin a new orbit is significant and does give us a chance to start fresh.
Personally, I’ll be happy to see the end of 2019, but can’t help feeling a bit silly believing that 2020 will be any different. Besides the tactical, life-organising nature of time, is it at all useful to drive change?
Perhaps our obsession with a ‘new year’ is an attempt to give us control over our lives. A mechanism by which we can draw the line and say this is when things change. Because we all know that life can change at the blink of an eye at any time. It doesn’t take the end of a celestial orbit to suddenly shift how our lives unfold.
Many ancient civilisations paid homage to celestial cycles from New Years to the summer and winter solstices… Maybe they too were trying to create order and control over the fluid, unpredictability of life that has no respect for time. Or… maybe there is something special about cosmic dates and they knew that well?
We can’t control life. When the clock strikes midnight and the sky erupts in explosive colour (if the Australian fire bans allow them), January 1 is just another day. But I don’t think that means that we can’t use it as a catalyst for change. If you realise you need to stop doing the things that no longer serve you and start making tactical life changes, it’s important to be specific. So, if we need to draw that line in the sand and use the earth’s orbit to sling-shot us into a better life then… why the hell not?
If you’re wondering; ’is a new year a fresh start?’ and getting anxious about the build up and expectation, just think that, If nothing else, New Years Eve is a time to celebrate with friends and family. A time to absorb the energy of the global collective consciousness as billions around the world countdown to midnight.
So, enjoy it and let’s all hope that this new decade brings us something a little better than the last.
Happy New Year.